Free Foul Tide's Turning by Stephen Hunt Page B

necessity borne of self-preservation and the love he held for his kidnapped child.’
    ‘You are a fool, Sheplar Lesh. Put the gasks in a legion and beat their pacifism from them and you would have an unstoppable force with which to hammer your enemies.’
    The Rodalian aviator sighed. ‘Perhaps we have fewer enemies than your empire.’
    ‘One enemy is all it takes. You will discover that, when Vandia arrives for me.’
    ‘We shall see, bumo. My country is a member of the Lancean League, as is the kingdom of Weyland. We will fight together if your imperium raids here again.’
    ‘Then you will fall together. Your web of petty alliances will not be enough to challenge Vandia.’
    ‘It is a sin to believe evil of others, but rarely a mistake. That is a quotation you can find carved in the wind temples of my country. I never understood those words until I travelled to Vandia and saw the conditions you held your workers in at the sky mines.’
    ‘And travelled back again,’ said Cassandra, hoping to elicit some information she might use to help her escape. But her jailor was not to be drawn. Perhaps Sheplar Lesh wasn’t quite as daft as he looked. They reached a spiral staircase winding around a tree trunk; twisting stairs leading to a series of joined pods raised high above the web of walkways. This, it seemed, was their destination. She began climbing the stairs after the aviator, her pair of native guards treading lightly behind her.
    ‘Keep quiet inside,’ ordered Sheplar. ‘Kerge’s fate is bound to yours … by more than the branches of his people’s fractal tree. Your generous treatment here has partly been due to Kerge’s intervention. If you were being held in a human town by the Weylanders you mistreated as slaves, your education would, I suspect, be more arduous than some classroom learning.’
    ‘If you and your friends ever hope to ransom me, you’d be advised to keep me well.’
    ‘The imperium’s gold is just one of the many things I do not require from it,’ said Sheplar.
    Cassandra climbed upward with renewed interest. So, her ex-slaves weren’t holding her for money? No ransom had been sent for, then. Cassandra wasn’t sure if her inestimable mother, Princess Helrena, would have sent gold or dispatched the price in steel, in the form of a revenge fleet to burn this barbarian backwater to the ground. It was looking more and more likely that escape was the only sure way Cassandra would depart this dreary place. And her fate was somehow tied to this gask ex-slave, or at least, the clemency of her treatment was dependent on him? She was suddenly alert to the possibilities and pitfalls awaiting her. The stairs rose through the floor of one of the pods. Cassandra found herself standing inside a large oval meeting hall, its wooden walls polished to a burnished walnut shine. She felt like a squirrel inside a tree’s hollow. But there were no acorns stored here, only seating built into the wall, some kind of council chamber judging by the number of elder gasks dotted around the room. A case that resembled a wooden cabinet had been constructed slanted across the floor’s centre. As Cassandra moved closer, she noted the cabinet was fronted with a thin sheet of glass. A complex wooden labyrinth connected inside its interior, like an oversized version of a child’s ball-in-a-maze puzzle, where marbles needed to be manoeuvred towards a maze’s centre. A series of seven jars had been fixed to the case near the floor, each a different colour glass. Was this some kind of gask gambling den? Did they drop marbles in the top of the labyrinth and make wagers as to which glass the ball dropped into? If Kerge owed a betting debt to some local lord, maybe she was here to watch the gang break his fingers as an inducement to pay? Cassandra knew such punishments were common among the criminal underworld of Vandia’s overcrowded cities, but felt oddly disappointed to think matters might unfold similarly amongst